Lock & Key

by Gordon Bonnet

  “I’m descended from these crazies?” he said, a little alarmed.

  “And also from Per Olafsson and Maíre What’s-her-name. Again, if we’re right about how this works.”

  “You shouldn’t be upset, Mister Ault,” Maggie said. “All of us are descended from a variety of characters, both savory and unsavory. None of us have ancestry that is pure in any sense of the word, whatever the nobility and royalty would have you believe.”

  “And a lot of those nobles and royals were fruitcakes themselves,” Fischer said. “You should read some of their timelines sometimes. They got away with some weird-ass stuff that never made it into the history books.”

  “I know that,” he said. “It’s just that, you know… I don’t like knowing that somehow I’m associated with these people.”

  “No choice involved,” Fischer said. “Like they say, you get to choose your friends, but you don’t get to choose your relatives.”

  “Unfortunately. But do you have any idea what I’m supposed to do when I get there?”

  “We know when the divergence occurred, and there wasn’t anything in particular going on at the time, at least not in a global sense. This was pre-Civil War. It wasn’t far enough west that the troubles with the Native Americans would have had any impact, at least not at that time. There weren’t any battles happening there, or anything like that.”

  “Well, that sounds promising,” he said. “At least it sounds like I won’t get shot at.”

  “So we think that this divergence—or, more likely, all three of them—were caused by a failure of the person in question to marry. Or at least, procreate.”

  “This is supported by the information you got in Norway, that Per Olafsson had a sense that he should have been married and wasn’t,” Maggie said.

  “Although how he would know that is a little troublesome,” Fischer said. “People aren’t supposed to have any access to their alternate timelines. They’re only supposed to have awareness of the track they’re actually on.”

  “This could explain some cases of psychic claims, perhaps,” Maggie said. “If the boundaries between actual and alternate timelines are leaky, in some cases, this might provide a rational reason for such phenomena as precognition, time slips, and déjà vu.”

  “I still think the Long Island Medium is full of shit,” Fischer said.

  Maggie nodded. “And could use a different hairstylist.”

  “Be that as it may,” Darren said, “I don’t see how that helps me much.”

  “In the practical sense, it probably doesn’t,” Fischer said. “It will be a matter of going back there, and trying to see what you can find out. Since Maggie and I are under house arrest, there’s not much we can do other than to tell you to be careful. There’s no guarantee that when you get back, we’ll still be employees of the Library. We might well be in jail, or out on the street.”

  “What street, Fischer?” Maggie asked.

  “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  “And I still get a night’s sleep in a real bed before I have to go, right?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Although I’ll probably have nightmares about going to church and getting the crap pummeled out of me, all in the Name of the Lord.”

  • • •

  As it turned out, Darren’s worries about a poor night’s sleep were unfounded. He returned to his temporary quarters at a little before nine. He briefly considered watching television—he figured that like a comfortable bed, it might be a while before he saw one of those again—but decided the bed seemed on the whole to be more attractive. He undressed and crawled between deliciously smooth, cool, clean sheets, and despite his long nap that afternoon and his worries about the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ Risen and Triumphant Through Suffering, was sound asleep almost instantaneously.

  He awoke at a little after eight o’clock in the morning, following one of the most completely refreshing nights he could recall. He dragged himself out of bed with some reluctance, and shaved off the scruff. His bathroom had been provided with an electric razor—whether by the ever-efficient Maggie, or left behind by the previous owner, he didn’t know. Afterwards, he took a shower, and with even greater reluctance donned his nineteenth century garb again.

  He was digging around in the food that Maggie provided, hoping for eggs and bacon and finding instead cereal and milk, which was adequate if not quite as appealing, when the telephone rang.

  “Ready to meet the congregation?” came Fischer’s voice.

  “No. Not till I’ve had breakfast. Give me a half an hour.”

  “I’ll be down at nine to escort you to my office. There’s a little more information you should have before you go.”

  The line went dead.

  “Well,” he said, “that doesn’t sound good.”

  • • •

  Fischer was nothing if not prompt. At nine o’clock sharp, there was a knock on the door, and Darren answered it, and found the Librarian standing there, clad in a scuffed pair of black denim pants and a threadbare “Collective Soul” t-shirt.

  Fischer gave him a once-down, once-up look, stifled a guffaw, and then said, “Sorry. I still can’t get over the outfit. Sophie really outdid herself. It’s amazing. You look like the love child of Daniel Boone and Bill Nye the Science Guy.”

  “Go to hell, Fischer,” he said, and made an angry gesture at the Librarian’s t-shirt. “At least I know what decade it actually is.”

  “Hey, now. Don’t knock the grunge, Frontier Boy. No one knocks the grunge.”

  They headed off toward Fischer’s office.

  “So, what’s the new information about?” he asked, as they took the long elevator ride down.

  “I’ll show you when we get to my office.”

  Maggie met them at the door with three mugs of hot coffee, and said, “She brought it down, Fischer. I let her in.”

  “No problem, I figured you would.”

  Sitting in the middle of Fischer’s untidy desk was the wooden box, its key still attached by a leather cord.

  Fischer sat down in his chair and picked up the box, then rapped it tentatively with his knuckles.

  “Huh,” he said. “So she’s sure?”

  “Sophie is good at what she does,” Maggie said. “I don’t doubt her, however peculiar it seems.”

  “What’s this about, Fischer?” he asked.

  Fischer held the box up in front of his face. “You see this box, Ault? Your little souvenir from your trip to Norway?”

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “Well, it doesn’t exist.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “We’re not sure. Sophie Lau, our best artifacts specialist, went over it with a fine-toothed comb. We have to do that, you know. Can’t have anyone bringing things back that played some later role in history, or make some kind of big change in preexisting timelines. So we have our artifacts specialists analyze whatever is brought back to see if its removal caused a divergence. If it did, we take it back and repair the problem. If not, then all is well.”

  “And what about the box? Did taking it cause a divergence?”

  “Nope. That’s because, as far as Sophie’s analysis goes, the box doesn’t exist.”

  “But it’s right there. It’s in your hands.”

  Fischer set down the box, and it clunked solidly on the desk top. “Well, for that matter, you are right there, and technically you don’t exist, either.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten about that.” He took a sip of coffee, hoping the caffeine would make what Fischer just said make more sense.

  “So her conclusion is that removing the box did cause a divergence, but only to itself. Put a different way, removing the box made the box itself cease to exist, but doesn’t seem to have made a difference otherwise. My contention is that it’s because the timelines are already so colossally fucked up that taking the box couldn’t make things any worse. But you do see what that means,
right?”

  “Not really.”

  “You’re going to have to put it back, eventually. For one thing, if you bring the box back and keep it, then it vanishes out of the fourteenth century, and it never gets to your grandma, who therefore never wills it to you.”

  “Maybe that’s why the key disappeared,” Maggie suggested.

  “That happened before I took the box.”

  “I’m not even sure what before and after mean in this context,” Fischer said. “Probably, they’re meaningless. But the fact is, once we rectify all the other divergences, one of us is going to have to go back to Norway and bring this box back home.”

  “To where? Lars Jonsson got his head cut off, and Per Olafsson died when they burned his house down.”

  “Well, we can figure that out when the time comes. Don’t forget, that’s only what happened when you visited a timeline that we know got mangled by whatever Lee did. It’s almost certain that when the divergences get repaired, they’ll both be in a completely different track.”

  “Oh. Right. I keep forgetting that.”

  “Thinking that way takes time,” Maggie said. “We are so used to seeing time as a linear progression. Seeing it as a three-dimensional network is not intuitive for most people. It is, by the way, the qualification for the job that made Fischer stand out from the other applicants—a holistic vision seemed to come to him quite naturally. Most of us face a much harder struggle to achieve that capacity.”

  “So, anyway, it’s something to think about,” Fischer said. “And you should be careful about picking up any other trinkets on your travels. You really can’t be sure what result it will have.”

  “At the time, I wasn’t even aware I still had the box in my hands,” he said. “I was more thinking about how I was about to have my head chopped off.”

  “I can see how that would make other considerations lose their impact,” Maggie said.

  “In any case, are you ready to head off?”

  “That’s a poor choice of words,” he said.

  “Fine. Embark. Set sail. Say bon voyage. Whatever. Got a good breakfast, finished your coffee, said goodbye to indoor plumbing for a while?”

  He took another big swallow of coffee. “Dammit. I really don’t like all this.”

  “Objection duly noted. Now, please fasten your seatbelt, and pay close attention to your flight attendant for the following important safety lecture.”

  “Fischer, stop being a pain in the ass and get this over with.”

  “No sense of humor, that’s your problem. Okay, fine. Like the last two times, I’m going to land you there a couple of days before the divergence happens, so you can get a feel for the place. Remember, you’re our scout. Learn what you can, and see if you can figure out what Jane Bell has to do with anything.”

  “Okay, I’ll do what I can.”

  “Oh, and give my regards to the Whackers.” Fischer wiggled his fingers at Darren, and then there came the all-too-familiar feeling of being yanked out of the Library and into nowhere.

  • • •

  A chilly blast of air hit Darren in the face, and he winced.

  “Shit,” he said, involuntarily. “Why November? Why couldn’t it be July?” He looked around at the countryside he’d arrived in, and saw neither the treeless, rocky hills of the Hebrides, nor the muddy roads and low houses of a town in medieval Norway, but an open woodland that would probably have been beautiful in summer. His landing place was a grove of trees, their gray and leafless branches reaching toward a leaden sky, with a carpet of fallen leaves and clumps of tangled underbrush. A little way off, the land sloped downward, and there was the gurgling of a creek.

  “It’d be nice to have a map,” he said. “At least last time he dropped me onto a road.” He shivered, and pulled the fur-lined jacket closer around him. “Of course, that was what got me run over by a horse.”

  He trudged off downhill, dead leaves crunching under his feet, and soon came to a stream chattering in a rocky bed. A rim of ice clung to the edges, and streamers of dead grass trailed in the swirling water. The whole thing looked lifeless and depressing, and there was no easy way to cross the creek without getting his feet soaked, so he turned downstream. If he followed it that way it would sooner or later lead him somewhere.

  “Sooner or later” turned out to be a relative term, as did “somewhere.” Two hours later he was still fighting his way through thickets of hawthorn, elderberry, and honeysuckle vines, and the creek still twisted its way deeper and deeper into a valley that showed no sign of human habitation. The branches of the overhanging trees became thicker, and the tangle of underbrush denser, and he was about to give up and retrace his steps back upstream when there came a distinctly non-natural sound—a regular creaking, like a cart wheel with a rusty axle.

  That sounded promising.

  He followed the noise, which seemed to come from around the next bend of the stream, and soon found himself looking down at a small building that straddled the creek. It was built of moss-covered logs and had a moss-covered roof made of wooden planks. It looked rather forlorn, standing all by itself in the little valley. A log dam partly blocked the stream, with a sluice down the middle through which the water poured against the blades of a large wooden mill wheel. From inside the building came the grinding of the millstones and the clunk of huge gear teeth.

  “Who are you?” came a gruff and not particularly friendly voice from somewhere behind him.

  He turned, and saw a very tall, lean man, with shaggy, grizzled hair, and a short beard and mustache. The man had a rifle under one arm, and a suspicious look in his eye.

  “My name is Darren. Darren Ault. Is this your mill?”

  “Yeah, that’s my mill. Why do you want to know?”

  “Well, I’m lost.”

  “Even wearing them eyeglasses, you can’t see where you’re going?”

  “No, I can see fine. I just don’t know where I am.”

  “That’s my mill,” the man said again.

  “I know, that’s what you said. But where is this? I mean, what town?”

  The man looked around him, giving an exasperated gesture. “You see a town around here?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. I was only wondering if them eyeglasses might make you see things I don’t.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Good. ‘Cause there ain’t no town here, far as I can tell.”

  “What’s the nearest town, then?”

  “Concord. Downstream a piece.”

  “How far is ‘a piece’?”

  “I dunno. Maybe five miles. Maybe less. Right where the creek goes into the river.”

  “Okay.”

  The two men stared at each other for a while.

  “I’m trying to find someone named Zebulon Bell.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s a preacher. Belongs to the, um, Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ Risen and Triumphant Through Suffering.”

  “Oh, that fellow. He’s crazy as a bedbug, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Why you want to find him?”

  “I need to talk to him about something.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t know where he is. Last I heard he was camping out down near the town. Him and his traveling circus. One of ‘em tried to talk me into going to one of their revival meetings, but I told him to get the hell off my land before I filled his left butt cheek with buckshot. He left pretty quick after that.” He patted the stock of his gun. “Don’t like it when them people try coming on my land.”

  “I can’t blame you,” Darren said. “From what I’ve heard of them, you don’t want to get involved.”

  The man tugged on his beard. “Yeah? Then why do you want to?”

  “I don’t. I only want to talk to him. I don’t want to join up.”

  “Watch out. You start talking to him, he starts making sense, is what I’ve heard. Thin ice.”

  By this time, the light
was dimming. The sun, unseen behind a thick bank of clouds, was evidently sinking toward the horizon. The lower reaches of the creek were becoming indistinct in shadow.

  “Look, is there a chance I could stay the night with you? Just to sleep, you understand. I wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  The man shrugged. “Don’t bother me none. You look harmless enough. And I got no one here, no family, nothing. I’d be glad of the company, to tell the truth.”

  “Thanks. What’s your name?”

  “The name’s Josiah. Josiah McCaskill.”

  Darren stared at him for a moment. “McCaskill?”

  “Yeah,” the grizzled old man said, frowning. “You got a problem with that?”

  “No. I mean… um, no. I just knew someone with the name of McCaskill, once. It kind of surprised me to hear it.”

  “Ain’t a common name,” the man said. “I’m the only one hereabouts with that name, and like as not I’ll be the last as I never married.”

  • • •

  Josiah McCaskill turned out to be a good enough host. Not as suspicious as Dugal Gillacomgain had been, nor as glum as Per Olafsson. Once Darren told him that he’d shown up at the mill after getting lost in the woods, Josiah accepted his story without further question, only saying, “You got to be careful wandering around in these woods. Never know who or what you’ll run into, and ain’t always who or what you’d want.”

  What Darren had been doing in the woods, and why he wanted to talk to Zebulon Bell, didn’t seem to interest him much, although his opinions of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ Risen and Triumphant Through Suffering were unequivocal.

  “I was down in the town couple of weeks ago,” Josiah told him over a meal of bread, dried venison, and dried fruit. “And I heard them Whackers at their revival meeting. You know why they call ‘em Whackers, right?”

  “I’ve heard,” he said, munching on a slice of bread.

  “They get called up to witness before the Lord, and then Brother Zebulon and the other Holy Members, as they call themselves, slap ‘em across the face. And after each slap, everybody shouts ‘hallelujah’ like something amazing just happened. Some of the ones who really want to get close to God ask Brother Zebulon to punch ‘em in the jaw or kick ‘em in the shins. Brother Zebulon is perfectly happy to do it, of course.”